Project Brief

This project was part of an eight week course to take an issue that is misunderstood, and use design to come up with a solution to address those miscommunications. I was part of a group of two other people, Layla Dev and Sara Lin. We decided to create a museum exhibit on the Model Minority Myth, a stereotype that labels Asian Americans as hardworking, intelligent, and law-abiding citizens. We focused on this topic in particular because the three of us are Asian American, and none of us learned that much about Asian American history while we were in high school. We also wanted to try to venture outside of our comfort zones, and none of us were too familiar with exhibition design before this project. We wanted to put the focus of the exhibit on college-aged Asian American students so our audience can get a first-hand account of some of our experiences.

Research

We conducted a lot of research on the origins of the Model Minority stereotype and Asian American history pre-1960s. We visited the Asian American Cultural Center on our campus and talked with some of the staff members there on past presentations that they've done to get a better idea of how to organize our information. From there, we decided to break our exhibit into three walls:

• a timeline of Asian American history
• large images of the people that we interviewed with pulled quotes
• an interactive wall for museum participants

Exhibit Layout & Planning

Early Versions